David Brussat: RISD sets Lovecraft spinning in grave

The crossroads of Waterman and North Main, at the base of Providence’s College Hill, is among the city’s oldest and most interesting. Here are the famous First Baptist Church, erected in 1778, the original...

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David Brussat
Posted Jul. 11, 2013 @ 12:01 am

The crossroads of Waterman and North Main, at the base of Providence’s College Hill, is among the city’s oldest and most interesting. Here are the famous First Baptist Church, erected in 1778, the original neo-Venetian hall built in 1892-93 to house the Rhode Island School of Design, and, ducking under it, the twin-arched tunnel built in 1914 to ease the hill’s steep grade for streetcars.

North Main was established as the Towne Street two years after the city was founded by Roger Williams. As the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission’s survey of 1986 points out, “Only a handful of buildings and monuments stand along the street to record the antiquity of this thoroughfare.”

The oldest of these, a mile away at 957 North Main, is the Jeremiah Dexter House, built in 1754. It now houses Preserve Rhode Island, the statewide sister of the Providence Preservation Society. Both should be on the warpath against a plan by RISD to further erode the historical character of North Main Street.

RISD has already begun work on an addition to its Illustration Studies Department, in the Arnold Hoffman Building, completed in 1848 across North Main from the tunnel. With its glassy modernism, the addition will slap its neighbors upside the head. Apparently as a sort of weird joke, the Providence Business News just ran a story on the project headlined “RISD addition keeps original’s character.”

Atop the story is a rendering that shows exactly the opposite (see above). While the building’s downtown face will remain unscathed, the addition will deface North Main Street no less than does the addition to the RISD Museum of Art a block farther south.

The old buildings on North Main in both directions feature an extraordinary diversity of age and style, but all of them fit together well. Even the turreted brick condos built in 2002, just beyond the church, fit well into the highly varied architecture of the Providence Art Club that climbs Thomas Street toward Benefit.

RISD could have taken that tack, but with an addition that contrasts with rather than fitting into its context — that is, in bowing to modernist orthodoxy — the school seems to violate its mission of “challenging assumptions.”

As it happens, one of the city’s earliest architectural historians and preservationists was local fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Timothy Evans, in the Journal of Folklore Research, writes that Lovecraft, back in Providence after two years in New York, “emerged as an articulate protector of the historic buildings and neighborhoods of Providence with frequent letters in local newspapers.

“In a 1926 letter to The Providence Sunday Journal,” Evans continues, Lovecraft “advocated a city-funded rehabilitation program for historic structures, especially the rows of Colonial and Federal houses along North Benefit Street (a slum during Lovecraft’s lifetime) and zoning laws which would protect historic neighborhoods from destruction, and would regulate new buildings so they were compatible with the historic fabric of the city. Such views, while not unique, were on the cutting edge of historic preservation in 1926.”

Lovecraft penned a long letter to the editor on March 20, 1929, “Retain Historic ‘Old Brick Row.’ ” Arguably, while not among the warehouses then facing demolition, the Hoffman Building was the one that got away. Lovecraft might have been channeling future objections to both recent RISD additions in this passage about the plan to raze the Brick Row:

“Behind it looms the far broader clash of city-planning ideals which it typifies: the eternal warfare, based on temperament and degree of sensitiveness to deep local currents of feeling, between those who cherish a landscape truly expressive of a town’s individuality, and those who demand the uniformly modern, commercially efficient, and showily sumptuous at any cost.” Granted, not many observers would confuse either of those severe RISD additions with the showily sumptuous.

In 1929, modernism had yet to make a dent in Providence. Lovecraft hated Victorian architecture and most styles later than his beloved Georgian and Georgian Revival. I have long envied the narrow range of styles available to his aesthetic hatreds. Were he alive today, the depredations of modern architecture would have driven him all the way around the bend.

On Aug. 22-25, a Lovecraft conference, possibly the largest ever, called NecronomiCon Providence, will be held in Providence, mostly at the Biltmore. Maybe its attendees will consider casting a Lovecraftian hex on RISD.

David Brussat (dbrussat@providencejournal.com) is on The Journal’s editorial board. This column, with more illustrations, is also on his blog Architecture Here and There at providencejournal.com.